Yackity-Yack

[Gweener]

Oh I TOTALLY agree there.
I just brought it up because I get so disgusted with the ugly underbelly of humanity.
And parents not being parents, and family not acting like family,...
no wonder there's a societal breakdown. The old saying, "It takes a village to raise a child." What, now it's ok for No one to do it!?
I thought it was a mark of our evolution that we look out for our young for so long compared to animals. Another clue that we're going backwards?
What happened to life being precious, a respect for life, a sense of responsibility?
Ok, You can get me going on a rant when it comes to the children.
I'm gonna take a deep breath for a minute.

But back to the hate speech. I'm a pretty laid back person, but boy, some of that stuff really burns me up. I mean, like, I can feel my anger button being pushed so hard that I can understand what Bruce Banner feels like. I've never retaliated personally. I have deleted an account.
But pretty much, if you have an opinion about anything,...
some one can play the offended. Hey, everybody has a right to their own opinion. And it should be enlightening to discuss, but getting ugly is not civilized.  

[Gweener]

Well, if they're going to be Trolls,
then I want to be the Big Billy Goat Gruff. xd  

[ChainsawDooM]

... I can't tell if you're being serious or not, but the term trolling is actually more like the fishing term than named after the mythical beast. In essence, you're baiting a thread, and waiting for the little suckers to bite at it and give you drama. It's just been misconstrued later.  

[ChainsawDooM]

Sorry if you were trying to make a joke... I'm not really all that... jocular when I'm in informative mode... like I was/am now.  

[Gweener]

ChainsawDooM

Sorry if you were trying to make a joke... I'm not really all that... jocular when I'm in informative mode... like I was/am now.

Sorry, I was being silly. It's just my way of releasing the previous tension.  

[ChainsawDooM]

Understandable. I likely would have appreciated it more if the circumstances were a bit different.  

[Gweener]

So what's your thoughts on the doomsday predictions for 2012, when the Earth will be lined up with the center of the universe and the poles are going to flip, etc?
I suspect after the Y2K hype, people will remain skeptical.  

[ChainsawDooM]

The poles are in the process of flipping... but it's not going to happen all of a sudden. There's going to be a period of like... 50 years where the poles are going to be all haywire... but scientists don't think it's not going to be as bad as people make it out to be. Some atmospheric anomalies and increased radiation, so a bit more cancer... but that's about it. I believe it's happened once before in human pre-history, and it didn't kill everybody (evidence being that we're still here). Don't quote me on that... I can't remember if that's true that it's happened in human history... but it seems likely.

However, I actually haven't heard too many of the predictions... although I've been meaning to look into them. I seem to remember a lot of people predicting the end of the word some time in the 80's as well. And there was Y2K... And if I remember right, there's a comet or asteroid that's got like a 30-60% chance of hitting Earth coming up withing the next 10 years, too.  

[ChainsawDooM]

... However... the lining up with the the center of the universe thing is completely impossible... since there is no center of the universe. There's a center of the known universe, since we are limited in the distance we can see by the speed of light... so we can only see as long as the universe has been around, about 4.2 billion years, if I remember correctly. So we're limited by a sight of 4.2 billion light years... and, technically... since it's what we can see... it'll be 4.2 light years in every direction and constantly growing at a consistent rate, so we're technically at the center of the known universe all the time. However, the accepted theory is that there is no center of the universe, no single spot the big bang happened from. Where's my astronomy book... let me quote from that...  

[Gweener]

I seem to always find apocalyptic stories intriguing. But the poles are flipping? I want to catch the show, I think it's the History channel, about how previous civilizations and prophets all predict the end of the world for the same time. I hope I haven't missed it. But wouldn't it be ironic if after all the alarm over the damage that we as humans are doing to the environment end up having nothing to do with the end of humanity?

Yeah, the possibility of something colliding with the Earth scares me.  

[Gweener]

ChainsawDooM

... However... the lining up with the the center of the universe thing is completely impossible... since there is no center of the universe. There's a center of the known universe, since we are limited in the distance we can see by the speed of light... so we can only see as long as the universe has been around, about 4.2 billion years, if I remember correctly. So we're limited by a sight of 4.2 billion light years... and, technically... since it's what we can see... it'll be 4.2 light years in every direction and constantly growing at a consistent rate, so we're technically at the center of the known universe all the time. However, the accepted theory is that there is no center of the universe, no single spot the big bang happened from. Where's my astronomy book... let me quote from that...

I was wondering how we could possibly be sure of the accurate center of the universe.  

[ChainsawDooM]

"In your daily life, you are accustomed to boundaries. Rooms have walls, athletic fields have boundary lines, countries have borders, oceans have shores. It is natural to think of the universe as having an edge, but that idea can't be right.

If the universe had an edge, imagine going to that edge. What would you find there: a wall of cardboard? a great empty space? nothing? This is not an edge to the distribution of matter, but an edge to space itself, so presumably you could not reach beyond the edge and feel around.

An edge to the universe seems to violate common sense, and modern cosmologists assume the universe cannot have an edge. That is, the universe must be unbounded.

If the universe has no edge, then it cannot have a center. You find the center of things---galaxies, globular clusters, oceans, pizzas---by referring to their edges. If the universe cannot have an edge, it cannot have a center."  

[ChainsawDooM]

Oh yeah, and it's not 4.2 billion years old, it's about 14 billion.  

[ChainsawDooM]

It goes on to talk about how the universe could also be finite, but not have a center, as well, and how the big bang did not occur in a single point, but the stuff that caused the big bang was actually everywhere, then it exploded. the big bang stuff is a little hard for me to get my head around... specifically going back in time from how the galaxies ar enow to the big bang, without having the galaxies move back into a single point... but they gave a good example of the three different ways space-time could be curved...

... I'll only show how the universe can be finite but still not have an edge, a closed universe, in which space is curved negatively, into itself. Think of ourselves as a 2 dimensional ant. Since we're two dimensional, we only know forward, backward, left and right. Up and down do not exist. Now, picture that ant crawling around the outside of an orange. If the ant keeps going in one direction long enough, he'll eventually get back to where he started, right? However, since he is two dimensional, he can't say the center of the universe is the center of the orange. To him, the center of the orange does not exist, because there is no underneath the surface of the orange. So, where is the center of the outside of a sphere? Well, there isn't one.

The other kinds of universes, flat and open, are both infinite, so the unbounded stuff still applies.  

[Gweener]

Wow, well that makes perfect sense. I picture a universe in constant flux just like the Earth on a smaller scale, with all kinds of cycles and interactions that would make accurate predictions nearly impossible, like predicting the weather but much bigger. It is fun to hear the possibilities though.